The Combinations, page 91
screws, screwing the fidgets.† All he could remember was the antique astrologist
† ‘You know what Kepler believed?’ the Prof said with obviously rhetorical intent, & Němec’d
smiled, wanly, & waited to hear what was on the Old Man’s mind, thinking snoreo time, kiddo.
‘Well,’ the Prof batted away a yawn of his own, ‘Kepler, a devout idiot, though somewhat heretical
also… like Tycho, mmm? — great minds tending to err on the side of contrary beliefs, not liking to bend before their masters — well, er, our dear Kepler fancied he’d discovered the true pantagonal
universe, like a big mirror held up to the M.O.G. (Mind of God). And in that greatest of all
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Mind’s geometry? Mathematic orderliness, harmony, a righteous settling of accounts. Ja wohl. The
instinctus divinus, rationis particeps…’
Ah, them old rationalist forceps, eh?
In the semidarkness, the Prof’s eyes had glistened. Amused perhaps. Wanting his audience to
share his amusement. Don’t take any of this too seriously, it’s all just smoke and mirrors. Enjoy the show.
‘Some say after Copernicus, God died. But there’s always a God dying somewhere in the
universe. One God dies, another one gets born.’
He’d paused, a deliberate touch, adjusting himself in his armchair. As if to convey the idea
itself, the ellipsis at the heart of the infinite conversation. Would the universe end? Inquiring man
crept from his cave & cast his gaze heavenward to see. For as long as He lay dying, the ancient
astronomers were at liberty count the follicles on His bald head through a telescope. The personal
God. So close & yet so far. Separated from His forsaken pets by the merest dioptric of a polished
lens. The Prof coughed —
‘Rightly suspecting infinity itself could never be observed, never measured, Kepler turned
towards arithmetic to translate God’s creative action into astronomical science. Even if God were dead , there’d still be the corpse to contend with, eh?’
The Prof’s monologues, Němec decided, were really tone poems, sonatas composed of the
judicious dramatic pause, around which he’d fit his themes — connect the arguments by a telling
silence — a constantly evoked intuitive register in EL. In this way he built an overall effect that left
Němec word-drunk —
‘Infinity, no. For Kepler, the idea of infinity was scientifically meaningless. It was a mere
opinion about the constitution of the world, unfounded in empirical fact. But keep in mind,’ the
Prof raising a finger in the desk lamp’s chiaroscuro, exactly like Christ in Caravaggio’s second
Supper at Emmaus, ‘that was only the beginning of the seventeenth century & infinity meant certain things it doesn’t necessarily mean today. Consider: Giordano Bruno, who Kepler
disclaimed & who was grievously burned at the stake for his sins. Well, for that matter, it isn’t
only the meanings of words that’ve changed…’
At the end of the first movement, the Prof stood up & went over to a cupboard beside his old
gramophone & took down a second bottle of Eurydice’s tears. They drank for a while in silence,
then he turned the vinyl disk over & set the needle down on it to play — a strange counterpoint to
the Prof’s mood which grew more pensive as the music grew by turns ironic, bizarre, burlesque:
Saint Anthony preaching to the fishes (who remain unmoved).
‘D’you realise,’ the Prof recommenced, ‘what it’d mean if everything could be seen? If
everything could be known?’
Leaning forward, peering at Němec through the gloom with Antonine eye —
‘What it’d really mean?’
Memory getting a bit hazy at this point, gulping my port, Eurydice versus this sudden vision
of the mad saint. What was the moral to be drawn, that Anthony was no Orpheus? Unmoved
because preaching to the converted: the Christ-fish? When’s a symbol not a symbol? The music had
become a rousing chorale, all hope & glory.
The Prof turned back to face his desk, Table of Oblation —
‘Ah, yes, but meanings change, nicht wahr? Kepler — dear doltish Kepler — brilliant though
he was, in spite of his sins, but a mere mathematician for all that, who, unsatisfied with his lot,
aspired, like pitiful Faustus, to be God’s true witness — an astronomer — a celestial physicist, so he called himself, he who hath Knowledge of the Heavens — hardly a demiurge, certainly no Author
of Creation, simply an annotator, like Swedenborg on his mad Munchausen mission to the moon,
or wherever it was he thought he went — how did he know his telescope wasn’t just another navel-
gazer’s dream machine? He peers, he measures. Wunderbar! The Rudolphine Tables, the Mysterium
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Cosmographicum — proof that a man needs to believe what he sees, or else see what he believes…’
The Prof folded his hands, the very picture of Enlightenment Man —
‘Astronomy, insofar as it was a science at all, was a science of appearances: empirical only to the extent it was speculative. A paradox, eh? What you observed you couldn’t get your hands on, put
over a Bunsen burner or distil into a beaker. But at least you could see your God at work, asleep or
rotting in His grave. They traded the obscurity of the Church for the clarity of a burlesque, served
with a dose of alchemical hogwash of angelspeak & hieroglyphics. Its holy of holies were
logarithm & antilogarithm, star catalogues & planetary tables. Kepler, a student of Tycho &
Hagecius, used a telescope not a crystal ball to probe into the secret parts of the unknown, though
the technology was sometimes as primitive as an ape’s priapus. The eye, so to speak, could often
see most directly by means of aberration, aided by calculus. A striptease by numbers. Such things
tested men’s credulity, but did nothing to diminish their desire. It was only a matter of time before
a problem like parallax was transformed into a tool — as if an immorality was transformed into the highest virtue — the proof-in-hand of a heliocentric universe ( the Earth moves! said Galileo). Only
a matter of time, then, before they recognised the aberration within the logic of their “science.”
Kepler never did: he believed till his dying day in polyhedral spheres, just as Plato had two
thousand years before, convinced he’d discovered the secret geometry of the universe — but we
shouldn’t blame him for it. Should we?’
It sounded to Němec like the sort of thing they’d had drummed into them at the Home —
one of the very first lessons: That you’re even guilty of what you don’t know. Above all, of what you
don’t know that you don’t know.
The Prof, after the exertions of his monologue, fell silent. For the time being the music was all
that could be heard — trumpets, horns, timpani — heaven & earth. O glaube. Brass, bells & organ ringing out. The silence at the end lasted only as long as it took the needle on the gramophone to
complete its stationary orbit & the background static of the universe flooded back over us. The
Prof, eyebrows raised as if to say, There, you see, how it all ends? The Day of Judgement and the Resurrection! dragged himself up from his chair to change the record. Seeing Němec about to stand, the Prof waved him away: his assigned role was to sit there like an ear & listen. The Prof
returned the disc to its sleeve, as delicately as if it were a holy relic, placing it upon the shelf with
all due regard to ceremony, eye of an imagined monstrance gazing down. What we listened to next
was a Deutsches Gramophone recording of Mahler’s sixth in Am, Bruno Walther conducting.
Němec must’ve listened to those passages of Mahler’s symphony dozens of times, yet they still
had the singular effect of drowning his thoughts. Like in Rilke, that music crept by me on the water.
Or perhaps it wasn’t Rilke, but someone else. He felt the music creep by him as though it were
tangible, on the verge of embodiment, all around him. A symphony of everything, sharp & flat,
bum notes, noise, blather, silence & all. Then someone slammed a car door out in the street & he
snapped back to what the Prof was saying —
‘For example,’ raising his glass to his lips & sipping at his port, ‘it couldn’t admit things that
appeared to contradict the laws of optics.’
The Prof turned the stem of the glass in fingers creased with age & seemed to regard it, the
glass or the light within the glass, with a certain degree of concentration if not of rapture —
‘Which is another way of putting the cart before the donkey, or is it the horse? You look at the
sky with a set of laws or with a metaphysics, what difference does it make? Man invents the
telescope, things appear to him through it, but a man still needs a mind to see what appears to him
& to make sense of it, nicht wahr? And so we’re back at the problem we started with. Because
astronomy isn’t, or wasn’t, only a science of appearances, but an art of appearances also.’
He broke off again, peering across the gloom as if summoning there some vision of his
antiself-of-yore bringing two lenses into coincidence & gazing suddenly, unexpectedly, upon some
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holed up in a tower in the middle of the Klementinum, back in the day, with an
observatoire cluttered with high-end instrumentation fine-tuned to the starry
sky. Quite the antipodal character, from the POV of so giant a man as Ebwarb
K, with whom the only notable commonality must’ve been a penchant for
altitude & patents pending on the Amazing Answer to All&Sundry (maybe,
too, on a clear day they’d’ve been able to wave at each other over the rooftops,
thumb their noses, shoot the chutes?).
But in the City of a Thousand Spires, what were a couple of
prestidigitators up on stiles to the greater scheme of things? Perhaps it was a
clue? Follow the towers? X them on a map, join the dots, see where the emerging
pattern led? Figure the Prof in somehow: The Prof in the pic up at Barrandov —
untold cinema of the mind’s eye in cosmoscopic close-up.
‘You see,’ the Prof resumed in a droll voice, ‘Copernicus didn’t just observe a universal truth, he
created that truth. That was the real revolution. Not to see clearly some thing or some phenomenon out there objectively in the universe, but to see that our seeing makes it so. How Galileo got himself into so much hot water. Dogma Incorporated doesn’t like that sort of business. Not because
they’re contradicted by it — the whole world contradicts the resurrection of Christ — which hasn’t
prevented two thousand years of the Cretinist Church — but because it vulgarises the pieties &
makes them into the stuff of peepshows.’
And dogma went to the dogs. God mightn’t exist, but try telling that to God. Despite himself,
the Prof sounded like the proverbial Man of Sorrows: he mourned his God to death. Knowing his
purgatory. But the Prof was no longer smiling. The source of his moods, however, remained a
mystery to Němec. He thought: But what if you simply changed all the names? Truth, revolution,
resurrection. Like Mahler’s symphony. Why Tragische & not (eh?) the Rehab Symphony, or Habeas Corpus, or Handbook of Heavy Construction? Was meaning as arbitrary as the arrangement of
cutlery on a table? The angle, for example, of the port decanter in relation to the edge of the
bookshelf? Or the dull axeblow sounding at the end of the last movement of the tragically
maligned Sixth? (Echoes of Mydlář in there somewhere?) Or the opposite of truth, revolution,
resurrection? Symptoms without causes. Ghosts of soulless, indeterminate things. (And what’d be
the opposite of a soulless indeterminate thing? A soulful determinate nothing?) Well, kiddo,
sometimes, er, a symptom’s just a symptom, you know?
The Prof set his glass down on the edge of his desk & idly picked at the inside of his right
nostril. A sliver of something wedged under his fingernail & he flicked it on the floor —
‘Consider,’ he said, wiping the end of his finger. ‘Why’s the question of faith so difficult?
Because we’re required to believe in the absence of facts? Or because we’re required to believe in the presence of all possible evidence to the contrary?’ Then absently, as if as an afterthought:
‘Humanity, for example.’
‘So humanity’s failed?’
‘Failed?’ the Prof raised his eyebrows. ‘What’s humanity got to fail at? Humanity doesn’t exist.
Humanity’s an idea, like God, only the critical mass is missing — not enough believers any more.
Because it’s too much of a burden. Whereas it’s easier hedging your bets that God does exist,
precisely because we know the universe can’t be explained. Why d’you reckon that is? What I’ve
been telling you all along. The problem’s in the explanation itself. It’s like a closed circle. Belief in God’s just another way of saying you can’t know what’s outside the circle by means of the circle.’
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the Prof in the Klementinum courtyard — the Prof hunkered down at the
“Donkey in the Cradle.” Hmmm. Were there others, sites as yet unknown?
Turrets of doom, campaniles of the seraphic swandive, panoptical watchtowers,
antique bungee poles, trapeze ladders for the flyminded?* Well, it was an idea
that could sure keep someone busy scratching their noodle, but it wasn’t Němec,
his noodle’d been well & truly worked over already, hehe. Still, with nothing
better to do now that the narcissistic impulse had ebbed somewhat, & with the
word-sump of that dubious cranium of his drained down to the dregs…
He looked out the window, but it was impossible to gauge the hour. You
see, the bright idea taking shape in Němec’s squillhead was this: If it mattered, if
he got there in time, he could get a ticket & see for himself what the set-up was
with this Kepler, take in the view, let the famous Němecian intuition do its job.
They ran guided tours on weekdays. Weekends, too, maybe. Only one way to
find out…
He pulled on his jacket & hobbled out, stick clattering on the doorstep &
down the stairs, without allowing himself time to think or decide otherwise, etc.
Man of purpose, man of the hour. Besides, if he didn’t get out he’d suffocate on
his own introspection. No sign of the caretaker on this fine afternoon-evening.
The whole house seemed deserted. In the street, water coursed down the
cobbled steps into the trenchworks where once the pavement ran. Bits of
propped-up scaffold stuck out of the muck, climbing up past his windows, where
it’d end was anyone’s guess. Němec stood there with the rain thudding onto his
bowler hat. The thudding grew heavier, then after a while it virtually stopped.
Camera Obscura
Ever since the night the Prof’s ghost first appeared, the night of “the Fall,”
Němec had felt he was passing through the world without really touching it — a
world that’d narrowed, a world standing still. First the pain & then the
anaesthesia. Or first the anaesthesia & then the pain. Chaos & abstraction. And
from the chaos… At first, confusion: an accursèd symboltome that couldn’t be
unciphered — backwards allegory of some extinct, lost, or imaginary tribe —
Book of the Dead, Popol Vuh, Codex Cinematicus of the Magik Hieroglyph,
DIY Manual for the Reanimation of the Signatura Rerum, an Abridged Martian
Almanac of Other Worlds than this One, an Android’s Doodling Pad, some
* Jesuits in leotards? [:]
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proto-Wolfliesque Bildnerei der Geistekranken, or else a Mythomaniac’s Map of
the Treasure Buried Under the Stairs: ratsfoot, sputum, pubic hair,
sticks&stones? From such intuited deductions as these, the humptyheaded
revelation thereafter, by degrees, by facets, with his (Němec’s) dousing dipstick
up the garden path & through the undergrowth, like an idiot hunting a stark
raving gnome, thinking he’s been a very clever little boy following the signs. Oh
ho! It’s Red Letter Day for Chumps! Well them ain’t signs, kiddo, they ain’t there to
be read, see? You’re the sign, hehe, they’re readin’ you! Hehe. Hehehe.
Němec pulled up his collar, hunched his shoulders, ploughed out into the
weather. Rain poured over the brim of his hat. By the time he reached the
corner, he was soaked. A little way down Nerudova he found a taxi idling in
front of a circus poster, showing clowns & an elephant standing on its front legs.
A fish restaurant advertised the night’s speciality on a chalkboard in half-
dissolved chalk. Carpe au naturelle. The driver sat there fidgeting with his meter.
Němec rapped on the window. The driver shook his head. Němec rapped again,
pointing at the sky. The driver shrugged & popped the lock. Němec got in. The
driver scoped him in the rearview, sagging bowler hat, scarecrow costume —
‘Funeral?’
‘Yeah, the whole world’s gone to the dogs. We’ll all be lucky to see the
dawn…’
